Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

First published: 1990

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Detective

Time of work: Late 1940’s

Locale: Los Angeles, California

Principal Characters:

• Ezekial “Easy” Rawlins, a factory worker turned detective
• Daphne Monet, a companion to rich businessmen and crime figures, the “devil in a blue dress”
• Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, Rawlins’s friend and partner
• Dewitt Albright, a lawyer turned criminal handyman

The Novel

Devil in a Blue Dress tells the story of Ezekial “Easy” Rawlins’s efforts to find Daphne Monet and also tells the concurrent story of Rawlins’s self-discovery. Set in post-World War II Los Angeles and centering upon the emergent African American community, Devil in a Blue Dress is both conventional detective story and commentary on American social relations. The book’s plot is difficult to describe, as the novelist attempts to portray almost all the story’s events as duplicitous or as having hidden meaning. At the novel’s conclusion, many characters’ motivations, fates, and identities are purposely left unclear.

Having lost his job in an aircraft factory, Rawlins is desperate to take any kind of work that will help him to protect his home. Joppy, Easy’s bartender friend, encourages Dewitt Albright to offer Rawlins work in the search for Monet. Rawlins, like most literary detectives, is naturally suspicious but still takes the work. As the story unfolds, Rawlins discovers that the case is much more than a simple search for a missing person. His entry into the underworld of Los Angeles parallels his struggle to come to terms with his war experiences and the guilt associated with Mouse’s killing of his stepfather.

Although Dewitt Albright has presented the job to Rawlins as strictly a case of obtaining information that might lead to the discovery of Daphne Monet, the very process of asking questions leads to Rawlins’s implication in Coretta James’s death. James was often a companion to Daphne Monet, and her speaking with Rawlins cost her her life. Having provided Albright with the information he needed, Rawlins must still deal with the police. Every time he has the opportunity to clear himself, he is drawn in deeper. The sense that he is in over his head leads to his sending a message to Mouse in Houston asking for his help. Ironically, despite Rawlins’s reservations about his friend’s violent past, it is Mouse’s ability to provide physical defense, to act violently, that Rawlins needs desperately.

Rawlins’s complete involvement is ensured when Daphne Monet contacts him. She tells him that she is desperate for his help in obtaining funds to escape the men who are searching for her. Although he initially contacts her to put an end to the “complications,” it is through this contact that he is connected to the murder of Richard McGee. Monet abandons Easy and causes him to be the target of both Dewitt Albright and the police. His only chance at survival is to search for her companion, Frank Green, a runner of illegal liquor. McGee had held money for Daphne and was killed by someone in search of those funds. Frank Green, whom readers know only as Daphne’s protector, must be found by Easy if he is ever to have any peace.

Rawlins is also implicated by his attraction to Daphne and by their eventual sexual encounter. Daphne ensures that there will be no easy way out for Rawlins. He must deal with the pattern of criminality that surrounds her and with his own belief that she is white. Additionally, Rawlins’s meetings with Matthew Teran and Todd Carter suggest to Rawlins the depth of the moral degradation around him. Teran, a potential candidate for mayor, worries more about Daphne Monet revealing information about his underworld life than he does about the condition of a small child he sexually abuses. In a similar fashion, Todd Carter, a prominent local businessman and Daphne’s ex-boyfriend, is less concerned with violence or even the loss of $30,000 taken by Daphne than he is with recapturing her, whom he views as his property.

By now Rawlins has also learned that he enjoys the business of asking questions, the role of detective. The search for Frank Green is dangerous and involves much subterfuge, but it is also emotionally satisfying. Rawlins is innovative and ingenious in his attempt to have a meeting with Green, and he recognizes his talent for and love of the work. He has more difficulty, however, determining the nature of his new vocation. It is difficult for him (and readers) to determine whether Rawlins is to be seen as the symbol of goodness or only as the representative of his own self-interest.

Mouse’s arrival on the scene acts as continuation of Easy’s moral confusion and catalyst to the resolution of the plot. Dependent upon Mouse’s violence for his own protection, Rawlins is further implicated in past crimes. The struggle to control Mouse is also a struggle to control his own dark side. Ironically, Mouse’s recognition of Daphne Monet’s true identity as Ruth is also the ultimate solution to the puzzle: She is black, not white; Frank Green is her brother, not her boyfriend. Since Monet is “found out,” she must divide Todd Carter’s money with Mouse and Easy. Joppy is killed by Mouse, ostensibly for misleading Easy. Mouse also kills Dewitt Albright, who had waited in ambush for Easy. The story ends as it has proceeded, with human life shown as extremely fragile in the face of deception and greed. The shape and meaning of the plot is best described by reference to the long list of murder victims: Coretta James, Howard Green, Frank Green, Richard McGee, Joppy, and Dewitt Albright. Despite his break from both Mouse and Monet and the temptations that each represents, Easy must still deal with police detectives, who do not appreciate the numerous murders or Rawlins’s sometimes sincere, sometimes contrived explanations.

The mystery solved, the novel concludes with Easy settling into his newfound vocation. He tells a friend that he has taken further detective work, although he is capable of living off his share of Todd Carter’s $30,000. The concluding image is of Rawlins tending his garden and struggling with the same moral dilemmas with which he began. The police will not go away, nor will the paradoxes and contradictions of an African American man quietly trying to live the American Dream.

The Characters

The protagonist, Easy Rawlins, has no family connections and is largely self-educated. He is a former Texas factory worker who has moved to California in part to escape the influence of his friend Mouse. When he is fired from his aircraft factory job after a racial incident with his foreman, however, Easy accepts the job of searching for Daphne Monet; ironically, the danger into which the search leads Easy causes him to contact Mouse and ask for his help. Easy’s is a divided character. Part of him wants to pursue the American Dream (he has recently bought a house, and he undertakes detective work in order to pay his mortgage), and this side of him finds the confusion and risk of his new job unsettling. He is haunted by his World War II combat experiences in Europe, and he becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the violent situations into which he is repeatedly drawn. Another side of Easy’s nature, however, enjoys his new lifestyle. Eventually, Easy discovers that detective work provides him with an independence and self-confidence that he has not previously had.

Easy’s friend and partner, Mouse, is shadowy and mysterious. It is known that he has killed his stepfather in a dispute over an inheritance, but little more is revealed about his past. Although he is violent and unpredictable, he values loyalty and friendship.

Dewitt Albright, the shady attorney who hires Easy, is less ambiguously presented. Like Mouse, he is unpredictable and dangerous, but he lacks Mouse’s loyalty and other values. Albright seems to have no morals or scruples.

Daphne Monet, the “devil in a blue dress,” is mysterious and elusive. Her real name is Ruby Hanks, and her mother is African American. As Daphne Monet, however, she passes for white. She leaves her home in Louisiana and the identity of Ruby Hanks to escape the memory of an incestuous relationship with her father. She has so perfected her escape from the past that she is described as a “chameleon.” She is able not only to assume different racial identities but also to become radically different personalities.

Critical Context

Walter Mosley builds upon the hard-boiled tradition of Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler and the revisionary work of the African American novelist Chester Himes. The hard-boiled tradition is masculine to the point of chauvinism and revels in dark settings, moral ambiguity, and the unreliability of appearances. Himes is not Mosley’s only African American predecessor; W. Adolphe Roberts (The Haunting Hand, 1926) and Rudolph Fisher (The Conjure-Man Dies, 1932) also wrote detective fiction. Like the best of Chandler and Macdonald, Devil in a Blue Dress is a complex morality play; like the best of Himes, the novel uses American race relations as the vehicle for moral commentary. Analyses of Mosley’s work will be most complete with an acknowledgment of both the Macdonald-Chandler tradition and Himes’s African American revision.

The emergence of Mosley’s work is coincident with a rediscovery of Himes’s detective works and more particularly the 1991 film adaptation of Himes’s A Rage in Harlem (1957). It is also coincident with the emergence of Terry McMillan’s romance novels Mama (1987) and Disappearing Acts (1989) and marks the reevaluation of the possibilities within formula fiction by African American novelists.

Devil in a Blue Dress was meant to initiate a whole series of Easy Rawlins mysteries. It met with positive critical response but little extended analysis or discussion; few individual detective novels have been given close textual readings. Literary critics and historians who have directed their attention to this genre tend to focus on the development of series and their relationship to other series within the tradition. Devil in a Blue Dress has been followed by nearly a dozen Easy Rawlins novels. As the Rawlins series has grown, it has attracted increased critical reflection. It is now compared to series by such noted authors as Raymond Chandler and Dasiell Hammett.

Bibliography

Bailey, Frankie Y. Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. Comprehensive examination of the emergence and development of black characters in contemporary detective fiction. Includes the thoughts of a number of detective writers on their portrayal of black characters. Also provides information on the emergence of the black writer of detective fiction.

Binyon, T. J. Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Discusses the detective as character within a variety of fictional styles, both British and American. A useful catalog of themes, plots, and settings. Not very strong, however, on African American writers or characters.

Geherin, David. The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985. Comparative study of American detectives in fiction.

Mosley, Walter. “Walter Mosley: Writing About Easy.” Interview by Elsie B. Washington. Essence 21 (January, 1991): 32. Includes discussion by Mosley of the sources and purposes of his detective fiction.

Nolan, William F. The Black Mask Boys: Masters in the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction. New York: William Morrow, 1985. Compendium of representative short fiction (by such writers as Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett) from Black Mask magazine 1920-1951, and a useful analysis of the hard-boiled style.

Skinner, Robert E. Two Guns from Harlem: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989. Critical and historical study of Himes’s detective fiction. Provides useful information on models and African American predecessors.

Soitos, Stephen F. The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Comprehensive overview of the history of mystery and detective fiction by African American writers. Bibliographic references and index.

Wesley, Marilyn C. Violent Adventure: Contemporary Fiction by American Men. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Study of masculinity in American fiction that includes a chapter on the representation of power in Devil in a Blue Dress and Ernest Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men.

Wilson, Charles E., Jr. Walter Mosley: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. Complete overview of Mosley’s career, including a biographical essay, an essay on the writer’s literary heritage, and a chapter devoted to Devil in a Blue Dress.